My story of how I ended up living in South East Asia

So as anyone who has followed me for any sort of time knows, I have lived in South East Asia for quite some time and I am from the USA. Very early on in my career post-college I had a job with the Federal government at a couple of agencies. Maybe one day I will get into the nitty gritty about those particular agencies even though I signed an NDA about them :P

But for now let's just stick to the stuff that can't get me in trouble. After working for various agencies for close to 5 years I had a particularly grueling project that resulted in workweeks exceeding 100-hours. After this project I told my superiors (I had a lot of them - one of the problems with government in general) that I was going to go on a month-long vacation and they could either let me have it, or I was going to quit.

I guess I was important enough to the operations - even though I didn't feel important - because they let me have the month off.

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Now this wasn't my first time to South East Asia but it was the first time I was going to be able to stay for what I considered to be a "very long time." The first time I came over here was several years earlier and it was for a whopping 14 days! I was unaware that a lot of the rest of the world vacations for a much longer period of time. A lot of Europeans go on year long vacations but to an American, especially one with a full-time job, the idea of doing this is infeasible. Therefore, one month gave me a lot more time to explore - even though I actually ended up spending all of that time in Thailand despite plans to visit the other surrounding countries as well.

While I was traveling around I found myself back in Krabi, where I wandered into a shop that was selling dive training courses and this a decision that would drastically change my life forever.

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I had previously taken a NAUI dive certification course in college, but due to inclement weather we were unable to finish the certification because a certain number of dives have to take place in the open sea for the cert to be legitimate. I already knew my way around the system to a certain degree and the price was right so I signed up for the Open Water level certification course.

While I was doing this course I met all the people that worked for the dive shop and all of them were really laid back and cool people. After my training was done for the day they would routinely ask me to come and have dinner and drinks with them and I have to say that I was completely enamored with their lifestyles.

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They all lived in simple housing like the one in the picture above. They weren't fancy but they were perfectly adequate. Most of them simply drove motorbikes and didn't even have cars. Few of them even had televisions and if they wanted to watch sports they would go to a sports bar in order to make that happen.

They regularly had BBQ's and hanging out on the beach, watching the sunset and drinking beers, was a regular thing.

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They went to work every day with smiles on their faces, they had a laugh while they were there, they enjoyed their teamwork, they were proud of what they had done in the day and were very happy and excited to discuss it with one another and the customers. They were not at all fake with their enthusiasm towards a day's activities and with rare exceptions, they were all great friends who genuinely enjoyed what they did for a living.

This was completely amazing to me...

When I compared this with my own life, where I literally loathed going to my job every single day - I found myself becoming extremely jealous. I probably made as much money as 5 or 6 of these people combined but I had no where near the level of happiness that they did.

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_{this is where they would have post work drinks... where i went back in USA was considerably less "nice"}

Even though I had originally decided to go all over Thailand and also to the surrounding countries during my month away from my job I ended up spending almost all of my time in Krabi and in particular hanging out with the people from this dive shop. This is where the seed got planted in my brain: There was no reason why I couldn't be doing this for a living as well. I talked about it with the staff at the now defunct Reefwatch center in Krabi, including a man named Ian who was the only course director in all of Thailand and as it turns out one of the most respected divers in all of PADI, globally.

He never flaunted this credential. He didn't need to. He wasn't trying to get recognition because he had already achieved the "top of the mountain" as far as life was concerned IMO.

I had spent my entire life up to this point believing that wealth and possessions is what made a man happy and by the time I was 25 I was making 6 figures, I had really nice clothes and routinely went and bought more of them. I had a really nice car that I paid around $40,000 for and was in the process of trading it in for an even nicer one. I had all the latest gadgets and would go out to dinner at fancy restaurants, normally on the government's dime, basically all the time.

Yet these guys were the people I envied. Some of them were making $30 a day, driving a $1000 motorbike, ate $1 meals and drank 50 cent lagers. They lived in cement boxes with sparse furnishings that they paid $150 a month for. I, at that time in my life had a condo in Chicago that I was paying $2500 a month for and it had a very luxurious interior. I also kept an apartment in Virginia near the Federal headquarters that I rented full time even though I only lived in it about 4 weeks a year.

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I was attempting to buy my way into happiness but instead I had just awarded myself with a great deal of stress and I was keeping depression at bay by constantly being involved in consumerism. Looking back on those days I can't believe I kept at it for as long as I did. I truly, TRULY, hated every morning of my work life and just like the 80's band Loverboy said in their one big hit... I was "working for the weekend" only my job frequently didn't have weekends because the government agencies that I worked for didn't have weekends.

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When I flew back to Chicago, I didn't even have time to go home - well, I could have, but the crazy traffic in Chicago made this not worth the effort so I simply had the taxi take me to my office and I slept in my office (we had showers there - which kind of goes to show how much they kind of expect work to be your life there) and the next day I had my custom-made suit on that I had made in Thailand. I was looking sharp, but I was wearing flip-flops.

I dreaded being back and in the following months I would start to make a plan that would change my life - I think for the better - a few years later.

More on that later.